ABSTRACT
The term mother tongue (sometimes called the user’s first language or L1) refers to the language that an individual uses from birth and use of the term suggests that each individual has one single mother tongue. However, multilingualism is far more prevalent world-wide than monolingualism is. A greater number of people use more than one language to manage their everyday lives than the number of people who manage their lives through the medium of just one language. The multilingual individual has very often acquired more than one language from birth and this leads to the question of which language is the mother tongue, and, indeed, whether a multilingual individual has more than one mother tongue.
